Technical Articles

Third-Party Products: Solutions for Developing Wireless Systems with MATLAB and Simulink

By MathWorks Staff


Wireless hardware platforms integrated with MATLAB® and Simulink® enable engineers, hobbyists, and students to move from theory to prototyping designs and deploying production systems. Radio frequency (RF) transceivers support a range of frequencies and modulation schemes. Programmable software-defined radio (SDR) hardware kits facilitate experimentation with new communication methods.  New integrated system-on-chip (SoC) devices combine programmable controllers with RF converters, enabling engineers to design and deploy 5G, LTE, WLAN, and other wireless systems on a single chip.


ADALM-PLUTO Active Learning Module (PlutoSDR)

Analog Devices: PlutoSDR

The ADALM-PLUTO Active Learning Module (PlutoSDR) is a platform for engineers to learn wireless and SDR fundamentals and experiment with SDR communications schemes. PlutoSDR includes the Analog Devices® RF Agile Transceiver (AD9363) and the Xilinx Zynq Z-7010 all-programmable FPGA. The transceiver features an RF front end, a flexible mixed-signal baseband, and integrated frequency synthesizers to provide tunable operation (70 MHz to 6.0 GHz) with channel bandwidths from 200 kHz to 56 MHz. A Communications Toolbox™ add-on package enables engineers to prototype, verify, and test practical wireless systems such as FM radio and WLAN signals on PlutoSDR under real-world conditions.


Ettus Research/National Instruments - USRP Hardware

Ettus Research and National Instruments: USRP Hardware

The USRP® product line includes tunable transceivers with frequencies from DC to 6 GHz for designing, prototyping, and deploying radio communication systems. The USRP Bus Series is best for low-cost experimentation, while the USRP Networked Series, USRP X Series, and standalone USRP devices are designed for prototyping more sophisticated systems. In addition, the USRP Embedded Series is ruggedized for field deployment. With Communications Toolbox and USRP hardware support packages, engineers can use USRP radios as peripherals for importing live RF data I/O into MATLAB. They can generate code with HDL Coder™ for deployment on select USRP Embedded Series devices.


Xilinx - Zynq UltraScale+ RFSoC

Xilinx: Zynq UltraScale+ RFSoC

Xilinx® Zynq® UltraScale+™ RFSoC integrates multi-gigasample RF data converters with the UltraScale architecture. With full support for sub-6GHz bands, it is designed for the latest wireless infrastructure standards and for a range of test and measurement, radar, and other high-performance, multichannel applications. Engineers can stream RF data into and out of MATLAB and Simulink to test designs under real-world conditions. To prototype and deploy custom designs, they can target Zynq UltraScale+ RFSoCs with HDL Coder and Embedded Coder®. With Avnet® RFSoC Explorer software they can characterize RF performance using waveforms from 5G Toolbox™, WLAN Toolbox™, and LTE Toolbox™ or custom waveforms.

Published 2019